“Efforts to silence independent research because its findings are unwelcome by an administration or president should alarm every American.”
A National Guard vehicle is parked near the Lincoln Memorial on August 14, 2025 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Brad Reed
Aug 21, 2026
COMMON DREAMS
President Donald Trump is threatening to sue a liberal think tank after it published a report last month casting doubt on the purported effectiveness of his deployment of the National Guard in Washington, DC.
The New York Times reported on Friday that Alejandro Brito, one of the president’s personal lawyers, sent a letter to the Center for American Progress (CAP) this week demanding that it retract a study it published on July 13, which concluded that there was no evidence the National Guard’s presence in the nation’s capital did anything to reduce violent crime.
Brito threatened to file a $5 billion defamation lawsuit against CAP if it did not retract the report and offer a personal apology to the president, according to the Times.
CAP president Neera Tanden said the organization was standing by its work and would not back down in the fact of legal threats from the president.
“This threatened lawsuit’s attack on facts and evidence is baseless,” said Tanden. “A fundamental protection of the First Amendment is to allow for the publication of facts and analysis that is contrary to the arguments and claims of any administration. A lawsuit is a transparent attempt to silence us.”
Tanden added that “efforts to silence independent research because its findings are unwelcome by an administration or president should alarm every American.”
CAP’s report notes that crime has been declining in major US cities across the country over the last two years, and it finds that declines in Washington, DC over that period were not significantly greater than in cities where there was no National Guard presence.
“Despite multiple tests using multiple data sources, measures, and windows of time,” the report concludes, “there is no compelling evidence that these deployments reduced homicides, violent crime, or gun violence.”
The report adds that the goal of the deployment was never about fighting crime but rather “a dangerous power grab by the Trump administration.”
CAP isn’t alone in questioning the effectiveness of Trump’s DC National Guard deployment.
Reuters on Wednesday published an investigation finding that National Guard soldiers have been mentioned in just 1.3% of cases brought before the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, which processes nearly all prosecutions in the city.
What’s more, the investigation found that National Guard soldiers were mostly deployed to wealthier neighborhoods in the city, where they responded to minor incidents.
After examining court records, Reuters investigators “could find no reference... to soldiers doing any kind of law enforcement in the neighborhoods where about 82% of the city’s 859 murders occurred over the past five years.”
Deploying the National Guard in DC is also an expensive endeavor. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) earlier this month revealed that keeping soldiers deployed in the city is projected to cost taxpayers an extra $1.4 billion through the end of Trump’s term.
Trump’s National Guard in DC Costs Millions Each Day, But Hardly Ever Stops Crime
Though National Guard troops now outnumber police officers in the capital, Reuters found they’ve been involved in just over 1% of criminal cases in the city, and most of them have been for minor offenses.
Though National Guard troops now outnumber police officers in the capital, Reuters found they’ve been involved in just over 1% of criminal cases in the city, and most of them have been for minor offenses.
LITTERING
The White House is visible as National Guard troops stand next to a military Humvee along Constitution Avenue on August 12, 2026, in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Stephen Prager
Aug 19, 2026
COMMON DREAMS
It’s been about a year since President Donald Trump began his military occupation of Washington, DC. But while costing taxpayers millions of dollars per day, a new investigation reveals that his National Guard deployments have done almost nothing to stop violent crime.
Crime in DC was already at its lowest level in decades when Trump sent in the troops last August, as was the case in many of the cities that came under unprecedented federal occupation.
Warren Decries $1.4 Billion Cost of Trump’s National Guard Deployment in DC
But while Trump claimed that these soldiers—who can only detain suspects but must call police officers to make arrests—were the only force capable of saving DC from “crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor,” a Reuters investigation out Wednesday found that they’ve had a role in responding to only a tiny fraction of criminal cases.
Since their arrival last August, National Guard members have been mentioned in only about 1.3% of the criminal cases filed in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, which handles nearly all the city’s criminal prosecutions.
And though Trump has repeatedly credited his troops with protecting residents from being murdered and mugged, charging documents show that his soldiers “mostly responded to minor incidents in neighborhoods that are wealthier, whiter, and less dangerous than the rest of the capital.”
Many of the cases where troops intervened, Reuters found, were to stop offenses like subway fare evasion and shoplifting.
Reuters said it “could find no reference in court records to soldiers doing any kind of law enforcement in the neighborhoods where about 82% of the city’s 859 murders occurred over the past five years.”
The investigation describes a pattern of soldiers simply standing around while crimes occurred and waiting for police to arrive. In one instance, police officers arrived to arrest a man stomping on a woman outside a nightclub.
According to one of the officers who responded to the scene, “There was approximately 15 National Guard members in the area on routine patrol who did not take any action.”
In another case, soldiers called emergency services after finding a man who’d been stabbed in an upscale waterfront area. But believing him to have only been intoxicated, they left him lying on the ground without performing emergency measures.
They only realized once the police arrived that he’d been “stabbed so severely his intestines were spilling out.” He died two hours later after being brought to the hospital.
The administration has portrayed the mere presence of troops as a “deterrent” against crime. But violent crime in the city has actually risen slightly in the year since they arrived. Data from the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) shows 1,712 violent crimes in 2026 versus 1,645 at the same point in 2025—a 4% increase.
Meanwhile, the grassroots group Free DC has been documenting hostile encounters between guard troops and city residents. The group has cataloged several instances in which troops have detained people, including those protesting their presence, with what it says was “absolutely no cause.”
“They harass people a lot more than they are actually doing police work,” said the Rev. Norman Nixon, the pastor of the Union Temple Baptist Church, who spoke with Reuters.
DC now has over 4,500 troops patrolling the streets. Despite lacking the ability to perform many ordinary police functions, they now outnumber the city’s police force, and maintaining the National Guard’s presence is costing more each day.
According to a report from the nonpartisan Niskanen Center, a deployed Guard member costs around $607 per day, compared with about $384 for an MPD officer. The Trump administration has estimated that keeping the Guard deployed until the end of Trump’s term in 2029 will cost about $1.4 billion.
The troops also played a role in the administration’s campaign to remove homeless people from DC and help federal agents dismantle encampments last summer as part of what Trump described as a war against “vagrancy.”
Last year, researcher Hanna Homestead of the National Priorities Project estimated that the deployments, which then cost an estimated $1.1 million per day, was costing four times as much as it would to provide an affordable housing unit for every homeless person in the city, which was pegged at about $257,000 per day.
The Defense Department has since estimated that the cost of the deployments was nearly $1.7 million per day. But that was before the number of troops doubled.
Applying Homestead’s methodology today would mean that deploying the National Guard is now nearly 9-10 times as costly as providing housing for the Washington, DC’s homeless population, all while providing little apparent benefit to public safety.
“I can think of many other ways that federal resources could have been invested to make the nation’s capital safer,” said Clinique Chapman, the CEO of the DC Justice Lab, in a letter to the editor of the Washington Post earlier this summer.
“For what it costs to deploy the Guard in [the] US for just six days,” Chapman said, taxpayers could have instead paid for the annual cost of running trauma recovery centers in each ward to help crime survivors heal and connect them to treatment and support.
For five days of the expenditure, the US could fund a mental health crisis response program like Denver's, which responds to hundreds of calls for service each month and reduces arrests, for one year.
For 41 days of what the National Guard deployment costs, the District could fund a year of living-wage jobs and pay the rent on a one-bedroom unit for every US resident returning home from the Bureau of Prisons.
ACLU-DC executive director Monica Hopkins emphasized that the point of the deployments was never to improve the lives of DC residents or enhance public safety, but a “political prop.”
“The Pentagon’s acknowledgment that the deployment will continue until 2029 confirms what we’ve said all along—there is no real emergency here,” she said in a statement to mark the one-year anniversary of the deployment. “As was true one year ago, armed military troops are not needed and are not wanted on our streets.”
“Because the nation’s capital is not legally recognized as a state, extremist politicians have used DC as a testing ground for anti-democratic orders,” she added. “We cannot let military deployment on the streets of the United States become normal or acceptable as a part of daily life here or anywhere else.”
The White House is visible as National Guard troops stand next to a military Humvee along Constitution Avenue on August 12, 2026, in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Stephen Prager
Aug 19, 2026
COMMON DREAMS
It’s been about a year since President Donald Trump began his military occupation of Washington, DC. But while costing taxpayers millions of dollars per day, a new investigation reveals that his National Guard deployments have done almost nothing to stop violent crime.
Crime in DC was already at its lowest level in decades when Trump sent in the troops last August, as was the case in many of the cities that came under unprecedented federal occupation.
Warren Decries $1.4 Billion Cost of Trump’s National Guard Deployment in DC
But while Trump claimed that these soldiers—who can only detain suspects but must call police officers to make arrests—were the only force capable of saving DC from “crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor,” a Reuters investigation out Wednesday found that they’ve had a role in responding to only a tiny fraction of criminal cases.
Since their arrival last August, National Guard members have been mentioned in only about 1.3% of the criminal cases filed in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, which handles nearly all the city’s criminal prosecutions.
And though Trump has repeatedly credited his troops with protecting residents from being murdered and mugged, charging documents show that his soldiers “mostly responded to minor incidents in neighborhoods that are wealthier, whiter, and less dangerous than the rest of the capital.”
Many of the cases where troops intervened, Reuters found, were to stop offenses like subway fare evasion and shoplifting.
Reuters said it “could find no reference in court records to soldiers doing any kind of law enforcement in the neighborhoods where about 82% of the city’s 859 murders occurred over the past five years.”
The investigation describes a pattern of soldiers simply standing around while crimes occurred and waiting for police to arrive. In one instance, police officers arrived to arrest a man stomping on a woman outside a nightclub.
According to one of the officers who responded to the scene, “There was approximately 15 National Guard members in the area on routine patrol who did not take any action.”
In another case, soldiers called emergency services after finding a man who’d been stabbed in an upscale waterfront area. But believing him to have only been intoxicated, they left him lying on the ground without performing emergency measures.
They only realized once the police arrived that he’d been “stabbed so severely his intestines were spilling out.” He died two hours later after being brought to the hospital.
The administration has portrayed the mere presence of troops as a “deterrent” against crime. But violent crime in the city has actually risen slightly in the year since they arrived. Data from the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) shows 1,712 violent crimes in 2026 versus 1,645 at the same point in 2025—a 4% increase.
Meanwhile, the grassroots group Free DC has been documenting hostile encounters between guard troops and city residents. The group has cataloged several instances in which troops have detained people, including those protesting their presence, with what it says was “absolutely no cause.”
“They harass people a lot more than they are actually doing police work,” said the Rev. Norman Nixon, the pastor of the Union Temple Baptist Church, who spoke with Reuters.
DC now has over 4,500 troops patrolling the streets. Despite lacking the ability to perform many ordinary police functions, they now outnumber the city’s police force, and maintaining the National Guard’s presence is costing more each day.
According to a report from the nonpartisan Niskanen Center, a deployed Guard member costs around $607 per day, compared with about $384 for an MPD officer. The Trump administration has estimated that keeping the Guard deployed until the end of Trump’s term in 2029 will cost about $1.4 billion.
The troops also played a role in the administration’s campaign to remove homeless people from DC and help federal agents dismantle encampments last summer as part of what Trump described as a war against “vagrancy.”
Last year, researcher Hanna Homestead of the National Priorities Project estimated that the deployments, which then cost an estimated $1.1 million per day, was costing four times as much as it would to provide an affordable housing unit for every homeless person in the city, which was pegged at about $257,000 per day.
The Defense Department has since estimated that the cost of the deployments was nearly $1.7 million per day. But that was before the number of troops doubled.
Applying Homestead’s methodology today would mean that deploying the National Guard is now nearly 9-10 times as costly as providing housing for the Washington, DC’s homeless population, all while providing little apparent benefit to public safety.
“I can think of many other ways that federal resources could have been invested to make the nation’s capital safer,” said Clinique Chapman, the CEO of the DC Justice Lab, in a letter to the editor of the Washington Post earlier this summer.
“For what it costs to deploy the Guard in [the] US for just six days,” Chapman said, taxpayers could have instead paid for the annual cost of running trauma recovery centers in each ward to help crime survivors heal and connect them to treatment and support.
For five days of the expenditure, the US could fund a mental health crisis response program like Denver's, which responds to hundreds of calls for service each month and reduces arrests, for one year.
For 41 days of what the National Guard deployment costs, the District could fund a year of living-wage jobs and pay the rent on a one-bedroom unit for every US resident returning home from the Bureau of Prisons.
ACLU-DC executive director Monica Hopkins emphasized that the point of the deployments was never to improve the lives of DC residents or enhance public safety, but a “political prop.”
“The Pentagon’s acknowledgment that the deployment will continue until 2029 confirms what we’ve said all along—there is no real emergency here,” she said in a statement to mark the one-year anniversary of the deployment. “As was true one year ago, armed military troops are not needed and are not wanted on our streets.”
“Because the nation’s capital is not legally recognized as a state, extremist politicians have used DC as a testing ground for anti-democratic orders,” she added. “We cannot let military deployment on the streets of the United States become normal or acceptable as a part of daily life here or anywhere else.”
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